“It's okay, to stay here forever
And it's okay to read in the dark
Put it away, wait 'til tomorrow
Put it away, and take care of your heart” — Earlimart | It’s Okay to Think About Ending
On the whole, our societal shift away from traditionally formal, solemn funerals toward more positive celebrations of life feels like a good thing. We all want to be remembered as our best selves, or at least for the good times we had and brought to others.
But there’s one aspect of most such celebrations that feels a little backwards — the person being celebrated is, most often, still dead. Sure, the rest of us are celebrating their life, but they don’t even get to take part in the festivities. Some people who know they have a terminal diagnosis take matters like these into their own hands to partake in such activities, throwing themselves parties. I, for one, applaud such an approach. Why not make the most of the time you have left? Isn’t that what we all strive to do?
If we have the chance, shouldn’t we try to celebrate life with our loved ones while they’re still here?
Dogs make life look so easy.
That’s one of their greatest qualities. Stressed out? Look at that good boy just hanging out, smiling. Sad? How could you be when there are ear scratches just waiting to be doled out.
Unlike us humans, who live evermore stuck in our past or worrying about our future, dogs live only in the present.
More than anything, dogs are always there. There when you wake up, when you go to sleep; there when you cook, always; there when you come home, the first one to welcome you back.
You can be cynical and think yourself a more complex being than them, but you won’t get any points from the universe for doing so. Dogs offer us an unconditional love we’re rarely capable of offering one another. The more we’re willing to drop our guard to offer it back, the more rewarding our relationship with them becomes, the more they become part of our family. And the harder it is to say goodbye.
When it comes to our dogs, there is no passing off the responsibility of managing their end-of-life care. We have, frankly, a startling amount of control over what that looks like. And while we can forfeit that to some degree and let nature run its course, we’re left staring every day at the pain and suffering that inevitably grow with each passing year.
This is, actually, a good thing. For creatures that have brought us so much joy and comfort, we shouldn’t be able to ignore the flip side of that contract we signed. But it’s not easy. And neither is deciding when the diminishing number of good days no longer band together often or plentifully enough to make the bad ones worth enduring.
Like so many things in life, we enter the contract of dog ownership clear-eyed about the final terms, but we’re never really ready to accept them when they come due. How could you be? It entirely defeats the purpose of raising, and caring for, and snuggling, and forging life-long memories with a creature so wondrously capable of absolute, selfless love to be constantly thinking about that all going away. Even as the inevitable conditions present themselves, and push their way forward in our consciousness, we fight to hold them back, to bask in the good days while managing the bad ones.
If we’re lucky enough to have enjoyed their company well into their golden years, we are eventually confronted with the toughest choice, a collection of answers that all feel both heart wrenching and selfish. We can’t ask what they want; we can only try, as the beings that know them the best in the world, to give them as much happiness and peace as possible.
And, if we’re lucky, we can celebrate their life with them, at the end.
They’re all good dogs. And I know everyone thinks their dog is the best dog. But I can tell you that my childhood dog, while great to me, was not great to most strangers, and struggled terribly from some traumas he suffered before we adopted him. Not Bear.
Bear was as close to universally beloved as I’ve seen, an unassailably good boy. Few people light up a room the way Bear did. It’s been remarkable to see how many of those who knew him have reached out with well wishes over the past few days. He wasn’t some Instagram celebrity or TikTok star, but he was easily the most popular member of our household, and for good reason.
I’m not exaggerating. Friends included him on the front of the envelope in addresses for Christmas cards. When a tech was leaving our old veterinarian’s office for a new job, she called to find out when Bear would be coming in and made sure he was scheduled for when she was working one of her last days, just so she could say goodbye. Another, different tech, when we referred a friend’s dog to the vet, lit up when he found out that it was “a friend of Bear’s.”
Micah’s had him since college, nearly 14 years, her entire adult life. I’ve known him as long as I’ve known her, and he never knew life in D.C. without me, as he followed her here just days before she and I met. Along with my cousin, who took the photographs, he was the only one with us when we got married, adorned in a matching blue bow tie.
As much tragedy as the pandemic brought everyone, it also forced both Micah and I into working from home most of the time. It came on the heels of one of Bear’s biggest health scares, when doctors clipped a blood vessel while removing a tumor, a pocket on his side swelling up like a water balloon. The emergency surgery to fix that — plus sedation and redressing the wounds, every 48 hours, for two weeks — was exhausting and set us back the cost of a decent used car. But Bear bounced back, and whether or not he thought he was the reason, he certainly seemed to relish in us suddenly being with him at home much more.
Thankfully, we were both there this last winter, when he suffered a stroke (or stroke-like event), which left him temporarily partially paralyzed. We hauled him up — all 100 pounds of him — into the back of the car and hurried him back to the same emergency vet, where we spent a nerve wracking afternoon waiting to hear the news, eventually being told he may never recover, or he might be alright after a few days. We stood huddled in the cold, damp, concrete garage under the office, and decided to give him the night to see if he recovered, not wanting him to have to suffer, not wanting his final days to be in that same medical facility he slogged through a few years earlier, but also wanting to give him the chance to recover, if it was going to happen. The next day, he had bounced almost all the way back.
He was in better shape that day than he was at the end.
His anxiety skyrocketed in his final week, which we could only partially manage with a combination of attentive care and medication. Constantly standing and pacing meant his back legs started giving out, only complicating everything. We can’t talk to our pets, so we can only try to be as empathetic as possible, to try to meet their needs and stem their suffering as much as we can. Without an obvious medical event, that boils down to a judgment call. And it’s an excruciating one to make.
We made that call Tuesday, knowing Saturday would be the end. That was the hardest part, if not the saddest. But doing so brought more relief than expected. Knowing allowed us to focus on trying to enjoy the rest of our time together, setting aside the frustration that can build when managing an elderly loved one whose physical and mental health is failing them. We traded off spending nights downstairs with him, sleeping on the couch next to him, to allay his anxiety. And we decided on a slumber party Friday night, with all three of us.
I splurged on a king salmon filet for his final dinner. After searing it, leaving the inside rare, I put the entire thing in his bowl in one piece, figuring that it would take him longer to figure out how to eat it that way. I figured incorrectly.
He got bites of our ribeye to boot, a surf and turf send off as luxurious as anyone could want, with head and ear scratches until he finally lay down to sleep at our feet Friday night.
Bear loved watching sports with us on TV, often tilting his head up and panting while taking in the action. But just as much, if not more, he loved the stock theme music that would often play before and after programming, particularly on the NFL Red Zone Channel. He’d vibe out to the orchestral mixes of percussive, classical music as we waited for the games to start. We found, hilariously, several mixes of those songs on YouTube, and put them on in the background Saturday morning, as we ate breakfast together.
We’ve enjoyed an incredible, temperate, dry spring in D.C., nicer than any I’ve experienced in my 12 years living here, the kind of thing you don’t want to jinx by talking about, that you want to savor every moment of and hope it lasts forever. It’s been what we call Bear weather, unseasonably mild with low humidity, where we can throw the windows open — and eschew the “Bear conditioning” — to enjoy the breezes flowing through the house. Saturday morning felt like the end of that. When I stepped outside in the morning, it was, for the first time this year, that nasty, stuffy, still heat that permeates summers in the mid-Atlantic for months, leaving you begging for fall. It’s suffocating enough for me, without being old and covered in a layer of thick fur.
Thankfully, by the time we took him down to the reservoir one last time to lay in the grass and gaze out over the ducks and geese in the rippling water, the clouds had broken, giving way to a breeze that, at least in the shade, managed the heat. We finished our slow amble back to the house, where Bear enjoyed three pupcakes on his outdoor bed on the back patio with the same verve he took on the salmon, wolfing them down like they might disappear if he didn’t inhale them whole.
As soon as he finished and we retreated back inside, into the Bear conditioning, settling in for the last time on the rug in front of the couch, the skies broke into a soft drizzle.
Grief envelopes you in waves. If you’ve swum in its ocean before, you know and understand its rhythms, to a degree. You can anticipate the swells. But gravity still isn’t entirely predictable. The very first thing my mom taught me about the ocean: Never turn your back on it.
Counting down Bear’s last days has been an emotionally exhausting series of those garish smiles we make as we fight back tears, the corners of our cheeks tightening up towards our welling eyes. But not dragging things to the bitter end means, on balance, the good days far outweighed the bad. And it’s all that good that I’ll remember.
His tail whipping into a helicopter when we would let him off the leash in our apartment building in Shaw as he rared back into a full sprint down the hall to our front door, then waited patiently for us to catch up and let him in. The way his brain would short-circuit whenever he knew there was food or a treat on offer, responding to “sit” by jumping ahead to one of the few other commands Micah had taught him as a puppy, preemptively throwing a paw forward for a shake, or launching himself into a barrel roll on the ground. His demands for an ice cube or a collard green stem (another final treat — I bought bunch Friday night just to de-stem them for him) as soon as he saw either one, the strange obsessions that scratched some kind of itch for him.
The way he used to sleep when he was young, upside down and strewn across his bed or the floor, legs splayed to the world, sometimes one arm stuck straight up into the air like a rockstar delivering a soaring lyric.
The way he took so completely to snow, even as a Texas native, the small part husky in him shining through his predominantly lab/shepherd mix, throwing his body into and rolling around in the drifts, leading us out on an expedition through the eerily quiet neighborhood at our last apartment following the huge snow storms a few years ago.
The way his right ear would flip up from its normal position, spread wide like the wings of an airplane or a bird of prey, when he was asleep, so we’d know when returning from a night out or a grocery run that he was sleeping on his guard dog duties.
The way he loved swimming anywhere he could, from the Atlantic, to the Pacific, to the Chesapeake, to the Potomac, to the Great Lakes. And the way he would lap up water as he swam, a lesson he never learned to connect to the intestinal distress that often followed.
The way he was always down to hop into the car and go, literally anywhere, even if the last trip ended at the vet, even if it was just to ride around for a while with the windows down and a stop at Sonic.
The way he jumped into whoever’s spot was still empty in bed to keep it warm; how that led us to getting a bed lower to the ground in his later years, so he still could; and how he’d lie down on top of the covers between us, tucking us in until he’d had his fill of ear scratches, then turn around and hop off to go sleep on the floor beside us.
The way that, in the last few years, he’d always leave food in his bowl so he could come back and eat with us when we sat down to breakfast or dinner, even leaving a few bites for us to find Saturday night.
It’s remarkable how omnipresent he was in our lives. When we bought our house, we said we were buying Bear’s retirement home. He spent more time here than anyone, including us. His favorite corners are marked by scuffs on the wall, from endless times easing himself into them as he lay down, shunning all three of his orthopedic beds for the cool hardwood.
The name of our Wi-Fi is “Bear’s house.”
His hair is everywhere — in the rugs, in the couch, on my keyboard as I type this. Hair that started all black before graying across his jaw, big, goofy paws, his belly, and eventually highlighting his expressive eyebrows. I’ve learned over the years to reflexively pull strays that catch in the stubble on my upper lip before they float into my mouth. It was on our swimsuits Sunday when we visited a beach we’d frequent with him, a few strays wisping off into the wind to settle into the sand. We’ll no doubt find them stuck in the paint and the floorboards up through the very last days we live here.
We’ve called him a Cozy Bear when he snuggles in one of his several beds, or a Fancy Bear when dressed up in one of his many bandanas (both nicknames for Russian hacker groups), so many times that our phones are probably under constant FBI surveillance.
It’s hard to imagine no longer calling it “turning on the Bear conditioning,” a phrase so routine I’ve accidentally said it outside of our house, where its complete lack of context or sense draws appropriately confused looks.
Still, we’re incredibly lucky. We’re lucky that his stroke, right before my birthday last December, didn’t force us to make this decision in that miserable, cold, wet garage. We’re lucky that the emergency surgery three-and-a-half years ago, while outrageously expensive, was a price we could willingly pay to get those three-and-a-half more years. And as much as we would have loved for him to be here to welcome our child into the world, we’re lucky to not have to divert our attention and care away from him when he clearly needed it the most.
Everything ends, and usually it ends poorly, in places we don’t want to be. To get to celebrate such a wonderful being in the comfort of his home, with the people who love him most, is a rare blessing. To get to be truly present, the way he was in every moment, with him, for him, away from our screens and stupid human affairs, to let him lean on us the way he was always there for us to lean on.
The world is a less kind and loving place with Bear no longer in it. But it is a far better place for having him in it in the first place. What more of a legacy could any of us ask for?
I’d be remiss not to both thank and recommend Lap of Love, who helped us handle this with as much grace and compassion as anyone could ask for. They made Bear’s transition as smooth and painless as possible, while managing the logistics that nobody wants to have to think about ahead of time so we could focus on being fully present with him at the end. If you’re facing a similar decision with your pets, please feel free to reach out to me directly for more information.
What a beautiful tribute. My heart ached for you as I read this. I'm so sorry for your loss.
Tearful tribute Noah. Lovely.